To Darkness And To Me
by robin baby
Summary: A tag for the season 6 finale, with some admittedly convenient changes. Sam and Dean try to figure out what's going on now that Purgatory has been opened. It's puzzling. There's some Cas somewhere in here too, of course.


19

_Author's Note: _Tag for the season 6 finale, but also not quite. I admit I made some very convenient changes, but this is how the story came to me after the finale, so I have no regrets ;)

_Disclaimer: _None of it belongs to me, sadly. Not even the title, which is stolen from Thomas Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard."

Reviews are love, concrit is always appreciated, and now enjoy!

'_Listen, Murasaki, listen. Do you wonder why the rain sometimes tastes like blood?' – _Hiromi Goto, Chorus of Mushrooms

'_In this strife I have almost repulsed and crushed my better angel into a demon. What I have learned has left me doubting, misbelieving, despising, regretting, what I have not learned;'_ – Charles Dickens, Hard Times

**To Darkness and to Me**

Crowley licks his finger and says, 'Dog blood. Naturally.'

Raphael turns and stares about the room, hissing Castiel's name.

'I would suppose so,' Crowley remarks, sounding halfway between bored and _This doesn't surprise me at all_.

'Find him. Bring back the blood.'

Crowley doesn't bother pointing out that it is probably easier for an archangel to find one of his little brothers, than it is for a demon, however powerful. Instead, he has the nerve to crack an insolent grin at Raphael. 'You seriously think there's anything left to bring back?' The angel glowers, and Crowley purses his lips. 'Well. I think this is my cue to go.' Within a heartbeat he's gone, and Raphael is left in stony silence, fingers curled into tight fists and perfectly manicured fingernails splitting skin, drawing blood. The air, though cool and damp, feels charged with his fury, and possibly fear, as if the slightest disturbance might be enough to set everything aflame.

But then he, too, vanishes with that brief, swishing sound, and without so much as a backwards glance at the Winchesters and Bobby. Perhaps he considers them insignificant now, or he simply is beyond caring in the face of his defeat.

Sam, Dean and Bobby stand in the middle of the room, dumbfounded. Whatever they expected to happen here, this wasn't it.

It takes several moments before anyone moves. It's Bobby that breaks the spell, shaking himself into motion, slowly (carefully) going to pick up the angel blade Raphael dropped.

Dean watches him and feels like there's a breath lodged in his chest that holds itself, and won't come loose.

He looks about himself, processing the place and the state of it for the first time. The tiled walls dark stains on the floor smudges and _puddles_ of blood. The smell of it suddenly hits him too, cold and metallic and sickening. For a moment, it seems entirely fitting that Cas shouldn't have been here when they busted through the door mere minutes ago. Nothing here would go together with an angel's presence. But then Dean remembers that Castiel isn't Cas anymore, and anyway they have yet to meet the angel who's squeamish over a little blood, or won't torture.

He tries to breathe deeply, but still the tightness in his chest won't uncoil. Everything about this place is repulsive. Everything it is, and everything it implies.

Dean was ready to fight Cas. For real. Not just talk and dark promises, but an angel blade. He knows he was ready to kill Cas, too, even if a silly part of him kept repeating _It doesn't have to come to that_ over and over like a mantra. But it would always have boiled down to it now that all those lines have been crossed, so Dean's mind was set, and the resolve to do whatever he had to had wound him so tight from the inside out, he'd felt like glass in a jaw vice. The blade's hilt was like ice against his palm when he stepped into this room, and God knows, even if Dean would never admit it to anyone, that his hands were trembling.

'Well,' Bobby says as he joins them again, sounding puzzled. 'What do you think –'

'Cas did?' Dean finishes for him, and runs his hands over his face. All of a sudden, he feels tired. 'I don't know. Opened Purgatory, perhaps?' If he's trying for sarcasm, it doesn't come across. Instead, the words sound like a dreary, weary and worn truth.

No one has anything much to say after that, and finally there is little left to do but leave, drive back to Bobby's, find the emergency whiskey stash. It's a silent trip, although if thoughts were sound, it would be roaring.

'Should we –' Sam begins at one point, but Dean cuts right across him.

'Where? How?'

Sam shakes his head and stares out the window at the black, racing landscape, and doesn't say anything else. Dean is right. Not just when he says that they don't have either the tools or the knowledge to track down an angel that doesn't want to be located, let alone actually found. But much more when he says, wedged between those two curt words and the clipped silence that follows, that whatever they might try to do now, would be pointless. It's too late.

When they arrive at Bobby's, they all feel like there isn't enough whiskey in the world to get them through this. It isn't just that they don't know what lies in wait for them now. It's also Castiel, of course, because now that he actually went through with his plan, it all just seems so much worse.

For all the angry words and categorical phrases, they perhaps all still believed in the famous backdoor. You can't blame them for it, either, with a track record like theirs. But this time all the doors have turned into walls.

An then it's one thing, Dean thinks, to lose a friend. To the job or something more commonplace. But it's another to lose them to the other side of some line you'd never cross. He felt that sometimes when Sam was hooked on demon blood, when he was meeting Ruby and hiding it from Dean. This is very much the same.

The night is sluggish and heavy like tar, dragging on drink by drink, silence by silence. Sometime between 3 and 4 a.m. Dean falls asleep despite himself, the strain of the past hours and days, and probably the alcohol, finally taking their toll. He dreams fitfully, of darkness slashed open by irregular streaks of silver and red, something swirling like smoke or dust perhaps, and a deafening sound like a rock slip.

As soon as it fades, Dean wakes up again as though that dream had been the whole point of sleep. The clock in the corner of the TV screen tells him it's almost 4 a.m. now, and a blonde, neat newscaster is talking, looking at Dean earnestly as if to say she's got all the answers. Someone (Bobby?) has turned the program to mute. It's been running since they got here, but there's no breaking news. Only the normal daylight world creaking around its axis of shady politics, sex scandals, and stock markets.

Dean sits up, rubs a hand over his face and swallows the last of the whiskey in his glass, grimacing as it burns its way downwards.

The darkness on the other side of the windows is like pitch, and once again Dean wonders what is brewing there now, and how soon it will come crashing through the thin sheets of glass and plaster that surround them. Cocooned in exhaustion and despondence as he is, Dean is certain he can already feel it, whatever _it_ is, like something breathing down his neck.

But everything stays silent, and eventually, just after 5, the night gives way to a strangely murky, cloudy dawn. Dean opens the front door and stares down at the morning paper for a while, the large bold headline letters dancing before his tired eyes, while his mind tries to remember if he's still drinking whiskey or has moved on to coffee already.

He wishes this were just one of their regular mornings-after, where seeing the sun rise feels like coming up for air from the nightmarish side of reality, which is theirs.

Over the weeks that follow, they're all anxious, constantly on edge, waiting for the great black wave, the flood of demons and unknown creatures breaking over them, they look for omens, death in large numbers, some kind of catastrophe. They try to summon Balthazar, they catch a few demons and question them, but nothing happens and no one has answers.

Eventually, Sam and Dean go back to driving where the job takes them, at first in pursuit of some kind of lead, always expecting to encounter something they've never seen before because who the hell knows what might come creeping out from fucking Purgatory, but they only meet ghosts, wendigoes, low-level demons, and all the other usual scum.

Bobby pores over his books and tries to find more about Purgatory, something that might give them a clue why everything is so eerily calm, but he comes up empty-handed.

For all this time, they see nothing of angels, Crowley, or another end of the world. It's business as usual, only with twice the amount of whiskey.

The job starts to feel insignificant, like patching moth-holes in clothes in the middle of a war. There's something else going on somewhere, something big, but all they can do is scuttle along the highways from town to town, picking up cases which they hope will either distract them or get them somewhere, although none ever do.

All the while, the weather is dismal, as if it never quite recovered after that first dull, chill morning. Almost as if it's trying to reflect their mood. There are thunderstorms more violent than they should be, especially for the season, and there are clouds hanging low that seldom let the sun through, and never seem to go away entirely. It's cool, and damp, and generally none of that is helping.

Dean never believed there really was anything to it when people claimed the weather was giving them headaches or toothaches or whatever, but this perpetual dreariness starts taking its toll on him too. Somewhere through the first few weeks, the greyness of everything settles like lead in his bones, and won't go away again. It makes him tired, all the time, and he can tell that Sam isn't much better off, although that doesn't mean that either of them is getting enough sleep.

At some point, Dean begins to wish for some catastrophe to startle them out of this torpor, but all he gets is a permanent, low-thrumming sense of nervousness that comes from this inexplicable _tranquillity_, and that sits like a tiny, quietly trembling ball deep in the pit of his stomach.

'Maybe it's some kind of trick,' he says one day, staring through a motel room window at the dusky, crimson-hued street outside. The horizon is streaked with black, and there's already an echo of thunder like an impending argument.

'I don't know, Dean,' Sam replies from where he is perched on the bed with his laptop. 'This one's between the angels, isn't it? And Crowley, perhaps. It's got nothing to do with us. Why would anyone go to the trouble of a charade like that?'

Dean is silent for while, then he shrugs his shoulders. 'Yeah, you're probably right. Still, I don't get it.'

He almost wishes Castiel would wing his ass down here and the fuck explain. People aren't kidding when they say uncertainty is the worst. And this isn't just unsettling, it's also damn well annoying, because after all that ado about epic fights and vessels, Dean thinks that he and Sam deserve a little more than being dropped like hot potatoes.

Then Dean remembers that he doesn't even know what Castiel is now, and that it's most likely best that the angel stays as far away from Dean and Sam as possible. The question, of course, is if that's the plan.

He sighs and sits up a bit in his chair, frowning at the weeping day as if he might glower it into brightening up. 'What's up with this freakin' weather, man?' he mutters, just to make the point again.

Sam shakes his head. 'I don't know.' After a moment, he adds, 'It's not an omen, I checked.' It's obviously odd enough to have got them both puzzling over it, though, just like the National Weather Service, who find their forecasts even further off the mark than usually.

Sam absently chews his bottom lip and keeps staring ahead, obviously preoccupied.

'You think maybe ...' he begins after a moment, and falters. Dean knows what he wants to say. _You think maybe we're off the hook?_

His older brother gives a quiet snort, half derision, half astonishment because sometimes it really seems like it. Sam at last abandons his research, gets up and searches through a heap up crumpled wrapping papers, empty water bottles and paper cups until he finds a bottle that still has some amber left in it. He pours them both some, and puts a glass on the table in front of Dean.

'You think perhaps it's actually over?' Sam starts again. 'I mean, Cas _was_ our friend, right? You think perhaps that counts for something after all?'

Dean closes his eyes and shakes his head. Because he doesn't know, because he doesn't think so, and because yeah, maybe it actually does, and that would just be ... he deliberately stops the thought there, grabs the cheap toothbrush-glass like it's done him wrong, and gulps down its three fingers of whiskey in one go.

He can't allow for the possibility that Castiel, despite everything, might still be acting as their friend, and _protecting_ them. Because that would make all of the anger unravel and all of Dean's good reasons fold in on themselves until there's nothing left. Getting too close to these thoughts is like teetering on some edge. He isn't really sure what's below, and he doesn't care for a clear view either.

Thankfully, Sam seems to catch onto his brother's unwillingness to discuss this, and drops the topic with a quiet, 'That'd be good news for a change.'

He doesn't even seem that doubtful. It might be one part misplaced faith and two parts wishful thinking. Or maybe there's really something to it. Maybe Castiel has other concerns now. Maybe Heaven has gone back to minding its own business. Trying to decide what to do to the world now that the apocalypse is off for good.

They start talking about random, pointless things, just to give their minds something else to play with for a hile, and finish up almost the entire bottle as the evening draws on and fades into night. Sam dozes off around 3 a.m., but Dean lies awake a little longer, listening to the heavy rain outside, drops flying against the walls and door and window like a hundred monsters knocking. As he falls asleep, the sound of it grows louder and denser, like fog thickening, until it's like the inside of a storm cloud. There are specks of white in the darkness, and then flashes of red and sharp silver jolts.

He wakes up to grey drizzle, and Sam snoring softly on the other bed.

That's how it goes, he muses vaguely, his mind dragging the thought out of the thicket of dreams, where it must have been reaching this conclusion. You let enough time pass after an argument, and the way things were before will make you regret it all the more. Dean almost laughs at this. _Argument_ is a slightly understated way to put it. Then he looks across at Sam and thinks, That would be like calling the thing with the demon blood an _argument_.

A few weeks later, they're in a small town in North Dakota. It's raining buckets as the sun goes down behind clouds that look like something mauled by a giant clawed creature, and where the rain hits the street, it has the colour of blood.

That night, Dean takes his glass of whiskey outside while Sam is asleep in their room, closes his eyes and prays for Balthazar again. He isn't sure why he does it, because the feathery bastard never shows, no matter what they do, and they tried everything.

So Dean almost drops his drink when, this time, the bastard does show.

'Well hello, Dean,' Balthazar greets him in his perpetually decadent tone. He's materialized right in front of Dean, in the middle of a patch of deep shadow outside the reach of the motel's street lamps. The rain has stopped for the time being, but the pause feels untrue already. The clouds overhead are growling. 'What may I do for you on this damp, unpleasant night?'

Caught off guard, Dean just blinks at him for a moment. 'Wow,' he finally says, 'thanks a bunch for picking up so quickly.' The old sense of irritation that used to be directed at Cas conveniently covers the surprise, and perhaps a hint of apprehension, in his voice.

'Yes, I apologize. You called before.'

'Several times.'

'Several times. It's been busy upstairs.'

'Really.'

'Yes, _really_.'

Dean stares at him through narrowed eyes, waiting, because the Balthazar he's come to know is so in love with his own voice and words, he usually does more than his fair share of talking. Tonight seems to be the exception to the rule, though, and the angel just stands in his bubble of semi-darkness, smiling indulgently, but silently.

And that's perfectly fine with Dean, because he sure as hell has questions to ask. 'Well, fire away,' he says. 'What's going on upstairs?' He hesitates, and then adds, sarcasm briefly slipping from his grasp, 'Why isn't the world ending?'

Balthazar raises his eyebrows. 'Why should it?'

'I don't know. Purgatory, perhaps?'

'Ah, yes. That.' Balthazar fixes him with that disconcerting, unblinking stare that seems made for peeling layers and layers off the soul and is so distinctly angel. Cas had learned to cover it with something softer and more familiar most of the time. Something more human.

'No,' Balthazar says. 'It wasn't opened.'

It takes Dean's mind a moment to process that. _Wasn't opened._ 'What?'

Raised eyebrows again, meant to indicate God knows what, and Dean feels the past few weeks change shape and colour in the space of an instant. This doesn't make sense. _Months_, he thinks. For months now they've been scuttling about with their heads ducked, constantly waiting for some world-changing, world-_ending_ catastrophe. When all the while there was _nothing_?

And anyway, _how_?

'But ... Cas had the blood.'

'So I hear.'

'What did he do with it? Where is he?'

Balthazar smiles, but it's a very odd smile. It fits him like party hats fit a funeral procession.

'I don't know, and I don't know.' He contemplates Dean silently for a few moments. For some reason it's then that Dean notices how the angel looks different. Like some expensive piece of art whose glamour has become chipped at the edges. 'I can only tell you that he didn't open Purgatory. And consequently didn't kill Raphael. And _consequently_, it's currently hell in Heaven.' That smile again. 'So I really must run, if you don't have any other –'

'Wait,' Dean cuts him off, 'what does that mean?'

Balthazar hesitates, apparently trying to decide whether this is worth his time. 'It means, my dear little dim-witted human,' he eventually offers, 'that Raphael's followers are slaughtering everyone who stood against him. Raphael's the only archangel left, he's got all the power, and we have nothing.' He shrugs lightly, a small throw-away movement that somehow manages to make him look tired and worn. 'Some of us keep fighting, some have surrendered, but it's all the same to Raphael. He kills us, and you're next. You, as in humanity, I mean. He'd probably love to end _you_ and your brother in particular, but there are plans for you, of course.' Pause, and a slight hitch in that practiced nonchalance as he continues. 'Remember the apocalypse? I think he means to take it up again where you left off.'

That hits Dean like a physical blow. Raphael. Who always meant to reboot the apocalypse. Of course. He frowns at the red-glinting wet asphalt and bites his lip. There's no denying he feels slightly sick at the thought of Apocalypse Again. He closes his eyes for a second, thinking wildly, _We'll deal with it_, and channels his mind somewhere else, going with the first thing it latches onto.

'Alright,' he says quietly. 'But where's Cas?'

'I think I already said _I don't know_.'

Dean just stares at him. _Then take a guess,_ he thinks.

Balthazar sighs, and surprisingly, it sounds every bit as tired and exhausted as Dean feels. Perhaps that's a worrying observation, because Balthazar always seemed unperturbed (or rather, amused) even by the most outrageous of circumstances.

'For God's sake, what a question.' The angel shoves his hands into the pockets of his pants and looks at Dean through narrowed eyes. 'We're talking about a royally pissed archangel here, Dean. Raphael knows exactly _how_ he won that battle. It wasn't because Cas wasn't strong enough. He outwitted Raphael and he would have gotten away with it. Obviously, he changed his mind at the last moment, but to Raphael that only means that some common little angel got the better of him. So, if I use my limited imagination, I'd venture to guess that Cas is dead.' For the first time since Dean met Balthazar, the angel seems genuinely bothered beneath his polished surface of _It's all a game_.

'Why didn't he go through with his plan? He had the blood.' Dean feels like a broken record, but his mind is running in circles. After all the pain and betrayal, he thinks. All that for nothing? All of that to then take a different turn anyway? He doesn't get it, and something inside him tells him that he _needs_ to get it. For whatever reason.

'I wouldn't know,' Balthazar says. 'Since my little brother got so involved with you lot, I've occasionally had trouble understanding him. Might be this is one of those occasions.'

Dean has no idea what this is supposed to mean, but he doesn't really care, either, because this whole conversation is sending his mind reeling.

'How sure are you that he's dead?' he finally asks. Funnily, Castiel seems to be the thing that churned-up mind of his has latched onto for now.

'Very.'

'Any proof?'

There is a pause, then Balthazar's voice, going from mockingly patient to disconcertingly serious as he answers. 'Dean. I repeat. This is the archangel Raphael we're talking about. I wouldn't know in which dimension to start looking for _proof_.'

A brief silence stretches itself through the damp, then Balthazar glances up at the pitch black sky above the sickly glow from the streetlights. 'If you'll excuse me now,' he says, 'I _really_ need to be on my way,' and then Dean is alone again.

He returns inside only when he realizes that it's beginning to rain again. Big splashes of darkness drop through the night, and into Dean's glass. Tiredness plays tricks on his mind and tinges the dregs of whiskey a reddish rusty colour.

When Sam wakes up a while later, Dean tells him what he's heard from Balthazar.

Sam listens in quiet astonishment, and when Dean is finished, he drags his fingers through his sleep-tangled hair and sighs. 'So ...' Long pause. 'We're assuming that Cas is dead?'

'Balthazar seemed pretty sure.'

There's another pause, then Sam says, 'Right. Well, that's that then, I guess.'

Dean turns to look at his brother, surprised by the dismissive comment, but one look at his brother's face tell him that the news stir him up as much as they did Dean. Sam is frowning at the carpet, jaw working as though he were chewing over all this information, the strange, twisted story that is theirs and Castiel's. Dean watches him, and waits, willing him to say something else about it all, and not even sure why. Probably, he's just been running in circles in his mind for so long, he wishes someone else would tell him what to think.

But Sam's mind is somewhere else now, so Dean finally turns back to the window and watches sheets of rain coming down from clouds that look scorched, and thinks, _Yeah, that's that then_.

He stands there for minutes, just staring until the window takes up everything and he sees nothing but grey lines of water slicing the world into blurry slivers. Sam weaves through them at some point, diving through the downpour and into the Impala, probably to get food or coffee or booze. Dean didn't notice him leave. He realizes that every muscle in his body is tense when his shoulders start to ache, and then realizes that this is how he's trying to deal with what Balthazar told him.

Abruptly, he drops his arms to his sides and goes to sit on the bed. That's that then. What a way to put it. It makes Dean feel, all of a sudden, like they didn't fight enough. Like they _let_ all of this happen.

Dean rubs his hands over his face and thinks, _Dammit_.

For half an hour or more, he tries to determine what this is, and why he feels like someone punched him in the stomach.

Cas turned against them, he wouldn't listen, he worked with Crowley, he wanted to open fucking Purgatory. Dean was angry, disappointed, sometimes when everyone else was asleep and he had only whiskey and a dark room for company, he would even admit that maybe all of this broke his heart a bit. But things go bad like that, and Castiel was never like them as much as Dean had sometimes convinced himself he was, and that was just how the story had gone.

He doesn't know what he'd thought had become of Castiel since they last saw him. If he'd thought anything at all. But sitting here now, in this grey motel room with rain pouring down around it like the wrath of God, realizing that Cas is very probably dead still makes his throat tighten.

_Closure,_ he thinks, closure would've been nice. To talk to Castiel one last time and hear from his own lips why he turned his back on that whole megalomaniac plan of his, maybe hear him say _You were right,_ and then – well, he isn't sure what then.

It's just that until last night, it all was about accepting that Cas betrayed them. Now, suddenly, everything is loose ends, and Dean can't see how to tie them up. Like this, it's nerve-racking.

When Sam returns, he drops some bags on the table (sound of rustling, but also of solid glass hitting surface) and asks, 'You think this weather has something to do with what's going on in Heaven?' He's soaking wet, hair to shoes, and looks cold.

Dean peers into the bag that sounded most promising and fishes out a bottle of beer, them remembers that it's morning and they probably shouldn't be skipping non-alcoholic beverages altogether. So he accepts a cup of coffee from Sam instead and takes a long drink while his brother undresses to his boxers and disappears into the bathroom to find a towel.

The direction of the wind seems to have changed, because now the parking lot, the cars, the street and the houses on the other side of it are one single blur, all swimming in the rain that is blown against the window.

'Yeah,' he says at last, 'maybe that's what it is.'

Actually, he is certain of it. And this is not how he'd pictured it. Full-on war in Heaven, like what Balthazar described, he would have thought to bring forth earthquakes, floods or volcanic eruptions. Like the apocalypse, somehow. Maybe he thought it'd rain fire and pitch and blood, and the world would become a furnace or a landscape of ice, the way people imagine Hell.

But this, this is like a slow drowning.

Sam appears next to him, smelling of the weather outside, and says, 'Ever hear that saying about the bang and the whimper?'

He rummages through the bags on the table for a few moments and then sits on the bed. 'Maybe it's true, you know?'

'What is?'

'That all this won't end in some great ...' he waves his hand vaguely. 'Explosion, or something. I mean, now that Raphael's on top ... we're looking at the apocalypse again, right?' He's silent for a few moments, scratching at the edge of the label on his seam of the paper cup. 'When Lucifer gets out of the cage, I guess he'll come looking for me. And I guess Michael will come after you.'

It's not as though the thought hasn't crossed Dean's mind before. But hearing his little brother say it still makes him feel like he's falling for an instant. He looks at Sam, and just from his face, it's obvious this is the last thing he wants, and it might just be the thing that he can't handle anymore.

Dean tires to picture the two of them running from angels again, and sacrificing God knows what only to be able to say No one more time. He thinks of Sam's saying about the whimper and wonders, _What do you mean, the world, or us?_

'We'll find a way, Sammy.'

Sam smiles an empty smile that comes so quickly and readily, he must have kept it at hand, waiting for Dean to say just that. His little brother takes a drink, and nods. 'Yeah.'

After that, things feel even more of a mess than before, if that's possible. They're both apprehensive and restless, they don't really have the mind for a job, but doing nothing would be worse, so they muddle through in a way that would probably make John Winchester turn over in his grave (if he were in one).

The sky above them, still a ragged, jaded thing of dull colours and violent sunsets, becomes something monstrous, the embodiment of doom, and they catch each other staring up at it as though it might crack and crash down on them any moment, bringing back all they fought so hard to banish from this world, and the end of everything.

It's grating on their nerves to have to travel below it, to ignore it when they should be focussing on some victim, some dark creature, or their own lives, and their whole bodies are itching to not work this stupid, irrelevant case or other, and to concentrate on the next end of the world. And the fact that they also both know they're too exhausted to face three archangels again just gives all of it a sick kind of twist.

But it's exactly the same as when they first tried to track down the creatures of Purgatory, after they last saw Castiel. There's nowhere to look for answers, no one to put questions to, and no crystal ball that will reveal anything to them.

This is worse than the first apocalypse, Dean thinks. Because now, there aren't even angels to mouth off to, or odds to defy. There's nothing. Like they've been put on hold. Dean men walking.

They set Bobby to do research again, but they don't know what he should be looking for and neither does he. They're at their wit's end, but if they'd admit it, they'd all fall to pieces, so they pretend. Bobby pretends to be discovering new leads in his search for the ultimate _How to Avert the Apocalypse Once and for All_ handbook, and when he drops each and every one of them again, the boys pretend that dead ends are just steps on the way to some kind of revelation, or whatever. It's exhausting and pathetic, and sometimes the desperation of it all makes Dean's eyes sting in a way that, if he's being honest, has nothing to do with insomnia.

Things have never been like this before, not really. _There's another way_ always worked. Thinking about it, Dean finds it almost ridiculous how often it did. Perhaps they were pushing their luck after all, and now it's run out at last. Dean's tired mind, falling back into old habits, blindsides him with the idea that a prayer might help, and sometimes it takes him a moment or two to remember that Cas can't help them, and if he could, or wanted to, Dean wouldn't ask anymore.

'How long, d'you think?'

'How long what?' Dean asks without looking up from the nicked police file he's leafing through. They're in Wisconsin, where people and animals are turning up with their hearts missing. They're suspecting werewolves.

'Till it all starts again?'

Now Dean does look up, and for a moment watches his little brother sit there, motionless, with his computer balanced on his lap, and seemingly hypnotized by the rain falling like unbroken strings outside. There's a lump in Dean's throat, and he swallows hard in an attempt to get rid of it.

'Don't think about it,' he says, and returns to his reading, relieved at the casualness-with-edge-of-command of his own voice because Sammy needs to believe that they can make it out of this _again_, and Dean is the one who somehow has to make him believe it.

There's silence for a while, then Sam continues, 'I wonder, you know ... if this was a no-win situation? And if it wasn't, who made the wrong choice?'

Dean doesn't give an answer this time, because he doesn't have one. He doesn't know anymore.

A few weeks later, Bobby is sitting at his desk reading in a newly acquired book, a dictionary propped up beside him because the damn thing's in old Greek. He nearly tears out the page he was turning when a loud crash shatters the afternoon quiet in the house.

Gun in hand and heart in his mouth, Bobby is on his feet in an instant, but the curse he has on the tip of his tongue dies away when he realizes what caused the commotion.

'It rained,' Balthazar wheezes, evidently out of breath, and looking very dishevelled for his usually flawless appearance.

Bobby blinks. 'Pardon me?'

'It rained.' The angel jerks his head at a window. 'Repeatedly, over the last months. You should've used water-proof paint for the sigils. Careless, but lucky for us, I should say.' He seems decidedly harried, but that might have something to do with Castiel slumped against him, unconscious and bloodied.

More out of reflex than common sense, Bobby puts the gun on the desk and hurries around it. Balthazar nods towards the couch. 'There?'

Castiel is naked, and his body is covered in blood and bruises. Bobby catches a glimpse of a deep gash that runs across one of his shoulder blades and right down his back, but Balthazar drops him on the couch as though he hasn't noticed. When Castiel is finally still in front of his eyes, Bobby realizes that there are many deep wounds like that. His arms and chest are virtually tattered, in places nearly black with blood, and there are parts where the skin seems to have been _carved_ off.

'Jesus Christ,' Bobby says, torn between astonishment, because the last person he ever thought to see again was Castiel, and shock at the state of him.

'Haven't seen him in ages,' Balthazar remarks. 'Raphael's around, though.' He watches Bobby, the aghast expression the hunter can't quite hide despite himself, and says, 'Well, be thankful you can only see the vessel.'

Bobby blinks, and seems at a loss for a moment or two. He as a distinct feeling that this isn't supposed to be happening, but he isn't too sure why. 'Care to run me through what happened?' he asks uncertainly.

'Well, what do you think, Sherlock?' He makes an elegant, sweeping, out-of-place gesture at Castiel. 'This is our big brother for you, _really_ pissed.' After a moment, he adds more seriously, 'I suggest you fix that angel-proofing now.'

Bobby looks at Castiel's still form for a few moments. He doesn't know whether to be angry or relieved about this, or whether to worry, or to remind himself of everything that happened just before they last saw Castiel.

He's beyond counting the times that he's either talked about this with the boys over the past months, or been snapped at for bringing the matter up. To say that he's perfectly sure about how Sam and Dean feel about Castiel almost half a year after the whole Purgatory thing, would be lying, but he guesses that's mostly because the boys don't know either. And Bobby himself, well. He's grudgingly, reluctantly, and not entirely willingly arrived at the conclusion that since much of it all _was_ about the boys, he might just have done the same thing Cas did. Or at least something similar, and Bobby isn't sure if details matter here.

'Alright,' he finally says, 'so what –' He stops and briefly closes his eyes. There's no mistaking _that_ sound. Bobby looks over his shoulder, and sure enough, there's no sign of Balthazar in the living room. 'Son of a bitch,' Bobby mutters, but the insult falls short of real annoyance, stuck somewhere between helplessness and worry.

Outside in the junkyard, Dean is working on the Impala, Sam handing him tools and fresh beers as they talk. The car radio is blaring AC/DC, which is why they don't hear anything much besides their own conversation.

Bobby calls three times before Sam turns around, and then he confines himself to gestures to tell them to get inside.

Once Dean has scrubbed the greasy dirt off his hands, they go and find Bobby leaning against his desk, apparently lost in thought. He's obviously contemplating something, and when they realize what, they both freeze.

'What –' Sam.

'Balthazar.'

'What, he –' Sam begins once more, but Bobby cuts him short again.

'Popped in just now and brought us our wayward angel, yes.' He pinches the bridge of his nose and sighs. 'So, what are we gonna do?'

Dean wasn't prepared for this, not in the slightest. Not for seeing Castiel again, not for seeing him like this, and not for how it affects him. It's like someone pushed the rewind button. He doesn't think about the past months and how they got there, he only thinks that this looks pretty damn bad.

He crouches beside Cas, putting his fingers to his pulse point. There's some rhythm there, but it's erratic and takes too long to find. Dean's first impulse is to grab Cas by the shoulder and shake him awake, but the angel's skin is so raw and _frayed_ that Dean settles for saying his name instead. This doesn't get any reaction, though, and neither does anything else.

_But that's fine_, Dean thinks suddenly, perhaps a little wildly. _We can fix this._ It's just cuts and bruises. Nothing's broken. _We'll fix it. _

So they do what they can, cleaning Cas's wounds and putting something on the worst. The cut on his back is garish, and it won't stop bleeding no matter what they do. Dean forms an idea in his mind about where this cut comes from, and wonders if all the damage to Cas's true form is translated to his human body, or just the worst of it. He also wonders if the wing is just hurt, or gone.

As they clean as much of the blood away as possible, they realize that there's a pattern to the cuts on Cas's chest. It's a sigil, and it reminds Dean of when they went for Adam in the Green Room, and Cas saying that he didn't have all that much faith in Dean anymore. And how the fact that there _was_ a wound similar to this one then, means that even when Cas had no faith, he still sacrificed himself for them. That was the time he fell.

But Dean doubts that this sigil now was made for the same purpose. Bobby looks it up later on in the notes he took from what Cas taught them, and with a little interpretation they decide that it was possibly meant to lock Castiel into his vessel. 'So he wouldn't ditch his vessel to escape the torture,' Dean guesses, and Bobby mutters, 'Bastards.'

It's funny what having Cas dropped on their doorstep like this has done. There has been a strange shift, the things that were foremost in their minds suddenly paled a bit, lost their leaden heaviness, and they've all reverted back somewhat, to _before_. When Bobby curses Raphael and his cronies, he does it wholeheartedly, and on Cas's behalf.

Cas doesn't wake up at all through the next days. His body is cold and so lifeless, he might just as well be dead. His breathing and pulse are faint and erratic, like a weak flutter of wings against his lips and skin. The cuts don't really close at all, and no matter how many blankets they wrap around Cas, his body doesn't warm up. There's some talk about actual medical help and hospitals, but they're quite certain that the vessel isn't the problem, so they drop the idea.

'Alright,' Dean says at last. 'That's it.' Three days were bad, four worrying, but now it's getting ridiculous. He has this idea that Balthazar somehow assumed they knew how to fix a damaged angel. Actual angel, not just the human frame.

Sam, reading in one of Bobby's ancient tomes without taking much in, doesn't need to be told what his brother means. They walk about Bobby's kitchen and pantry quietly for a few moments, picking up what they need to drag Balthazar's designer-clad backside down here. They take everything to the junk yard, just as they did a little over six months ago, although it feels like an eternity has gone by since then.

They do the ritual three times, until they run out of ingredients. Nothing happens.

'Come on,' Dean half yells after the third time, 'this isn't about us! At least show your face!'

Balthazar probably would have, too. But by the time Sam and Dean try to summon him once again, he's already dead. (They'll only learn this much, much later.)

Perhaps it doesn't really matter, though, at least nor for Cas. It takes two more days, but Dean finally realize why Balthazar brought Castiel here. It wasn't so they could fix him. Balthazar could probably have done a much better job of that himself. But Balthazar probably also knew the moment he saw Cas again, or touched him, that there was no fixing this.

'Right,' Bobby announces, thumping down a glass of whiskey in front of Dean. It sits precariously on the bent wooden top of the porch banister. 'Spill.'

Dean raises his eyebrows at the glass and replies, 'That would be a shame.'

His friend just rolls his eyes and chooses not to favour that with a comment. Instead, he says, 'I can tell you've got something on your mind, kid.'

'Well, you wouldn't believe it, under the circumstances, right?'

'Dean.'

'Come on, Bobby. We've all got something on our minds, don't we? Does it have to be me you play shrink to?'

'Actually, yeah. 'Cause you're the one that usually keeps everything bottled up. Sam talks when he needs to.'

Dean sighs and looks in the other direction. The silence stretches out, but the fact that there is no more protest or eloquent variations on _Leave me alone_, probably means something. 'I just ... I don't know what to do about Cas.'

'Seems like there's nothing we can do. Maybe we just gotta be patient, you know? He'll pull through.'

Dean shakes his head and stares at the dreary junkyard. Misty spray is coating his hands where they're resting on the banister as he leans on it, and the air is cold and humid. The sky looks like it's sinking down onto the world, like dirty, soaked cotton wool.

'This is really fucked up, man'

Bobby nods slowly. 'Yeah it is.'

'D'you think Cas should've gone through with it? And we should've, you know. Gone along with it too?'

'No,' Bobby replies at once. That's why it's so fucked up. There seems to have been no right thing to do.

'No,' Dean repeats. 'It's just …' He trails off, runs a hand through his hair, across his tired face.

It's just that Sammy's falling to pieces. Dean can see it. Sam said yes to Lucifer to prevent the apocalypse from happening, he went to Hell and lost his soul coming back, and now it's starting all over. It'll be too much, and it's breaking Sam even now. Dean knows he'll have to keep his little brother together somehow, but there's moments now when he isn't sure he can keep it together himself.

'We can't do this again, Bobby.' He shakes his head. 'We barely got away last time, and those were the only tricks we got. They know them all now, and we don't even –' He clamps down on the next part of the sentence, because there's something he doesn't want to say yet, although he already knows it.

'Don't even what?' Bobby asks quietly, and Dean shrugs. He leaves Bobby to finish the sentence for himself because it doesn't really matter what they don't even.

What Dean is thinking is that now, there is no one in Heaven who'll help them, or soon won't be. Not a single angel, and there isn't any other creature Dean knows of that has the kind of power Cas had, or the knowledge.

Bobby stays silent. Probably there isn't a lot he can say to this, not without lying to both of them. After a while, he squeezes Dean's shoulder and then leaves him alone on the porch.

Night is creeping in and the temperature drops another few degrees. Dean leaves his untouched glass, filling up with dark rainwater that turns its insides a rusty red. As he goes inside, there's a flash of painfully clear images in front of his eyes, like lightning, and suddenly he knows what he's been dreaming about all this while. Black cliffs a storm and glass breaking moonlight jumping off the fragments. Waves of an ocean licking the mixed blood of two creatures off the rocks. A memory of Cas's.

He can hear Bobby tinkering about in the basement, and Sam vanished hours ago. Probably he's just driving around, something he's been doing more and more often lately, every time they've been stationary for a few days at a time. It's restlessness and fear and despair, all the things that are tearing him apart now that they know what's in store for them (again).

The sheer scope of all that happened finally sinks into Dean's bones and suddenly it seems ludicrous that they should all have experienced it on such a profoundly personal level. How they made war in Heaven and the end of the world a matter of trust.

It's nearly unbelievable, too, how after all the fighting and confusion, everything condenses into this. Him sitting beside still, pale Cas, rain pouring down on the world like there'll be no tomorrow (perhaps there won't), and everything else finally fallen away.

'Dammit, Cas,' Dean murmurs, trying to rub the exhaustion out of his eyes, trying to stay awake and certain he couldn't sleep if he tried. 'How the hell did this happen?' It's really the greatest mystery of all. 'Wake up man, so we can talk this through, okay? I can't figure it out.'

The rain never stops all through the night, the darkness making the water look like blood running in rivulets down the windows. Dawn breaks just as wet, and cold and tired, like the day itself can barely gather the strength to drag itself over the horizon.

When Cas dies, there's no flash of white light, no charcoal powdery wings burned across the dips and rises of Bobby's living room. He simply stops breathing.

It fits, Dean thinks. Probably, after everything – the months of being in Raphael's clutches especially – there just wasn't much left inside of Cas. There's no fight left in anything much.

_Fin._

Thanks for reading! Drop me a line and tell me what you think?


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